Since the release of SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 1 in April 2009, it has been possible to install SQL Server with media that includes the latest patches, whether they be Service Packs (for SQL Server 2016 and prior), Cumulative Updates, and even hotfixes. There was the hint of a promise with the new servicing-> Continue reading Create a slipstream installer for SQL Server on Windows

On Monday of this week, Microsoft announced changes to the servicing model for SQL Server, starting with SQL Server 2017. From today onward, we can expect to see the following during the first five years after release (known as Mainstream Support): One Cumulative Update per month for the first twelve months. One Cumulative Update every-> Continue reading Changes to the SQL Server servicing model (Cumulative Updates)

In November 2017, during the PASS Summit keynote, Microsoft’s Bob Ward (Principal Architect) demonstrated a “diskless database” running on Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) hardware. The storage layer is known as “persistent memory”. At the end of November, Bob and his colleague Jamie Reding (Senior Program Manager) wrote a blog post about this new thing, which you-> Continue reading No moving parts, the story of persistent memory

For the last five months or so, I have been helping some really smart people put words on paper, both the physical and electronic kind, which is hopefully going to culminate in an actual technical book that I can point to and say “Yes, that’s the name I invented for myself when we moved to-> Continue reading SQL Server 2017 Administration Inside Out

Joe Obbish wrote an epic post a few weeks ago about loading a trillion rows into a non-partitioned table in SQL Server, using a clustered columnstore index to maximise the compression. (Short version: it’s very slow to query. Don’t do it. Bad things happen. I have an ongoing investigation with Ewald Cress about the evil-> Continue reading A trillion and one

Version numbers are confusing. SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), the client user interface by which most DBAs access SQL Server, was decoupled from the server product for SQL Server 2016. For the last 18 months or so, we have been receiving semi-regular updates to SSMS (which we can download from Microsoft, for free), which is-> Continue reading SQL Server Management Studio v17.0

By now you will have heard that the next version of SQL Server has been announced. There’s no release date yet, but Brent Ozar seems to think it’ll be before June. There are many new features, but the biggest deal is that SQL Server 2017 runs on both Windows Server and Linux. Yup, SQL Server 2017-> Continue reading SQL Server 2017 Announced